The Current

Why the Democratic Infighting in Houston Fizzled Out

Lizzie Pannill Fletcher's election-night party on Tuesday, at the Buffalo Grill, in Houston. Fletcher defeated Laura Moser in a runoff to be the Democratic candidate for Texas’s Seventh Congressional District.

Photograph by Elizabeth Conley / Houston Chronicle via AP

One of the more notable early primary races in the country ended in undramatic fashion on Tuesday, with Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, a prominent Houston attorney, easily—and rather cordially—beating out Laura Moser, a writer and activist, in a runoff of the Democratic congressional primary in Texas’s Seventh District. Earlier this year, Moser’s campaign became a rallying point for progressives, after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—the campaign arm of the House of Representatives’ Democratic Caucus—publicly denounced her as a carpetbagger. Moser grew up in Houston, and moved back to the city from Washington, D.C., only last year, but, as The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino wrote in March, the subtext of the D.C.C.C.’s attack was that Moser was too liberal to be electable. Republicans have held the Texas Seventh—a swath of primarily wealthy suburbs on the western side of Houston—since 1966, and its current representative, John Culberson, has held the seat since 2000. Yet Hillary Clinton surprisingly edged out Donald Trump in the district in 2016, and Democrats believe that they have a shot at flipping the seat this year. The D.C.C.C.’s move against Moser backfired, however: the attack resulted in a flood of attention and donations to Moser’s campaign, and she took second behind Fletcher in the first round of voting.

By Tuesday’s runoff, that drama was a memory. “After the primary, Fletcher and Moser avoided talking about the D.C.C.C. dustup,” Tolentino said on Wednesday morning. “I got the sense that the people in Houston were sick of hearing about it.” Fletcher and Moser had their differences—Moser is a proponent of Medicare for all, and has called for the President’s impeachment, whereas Fletcher is seen as a much more moderate figure—but by the end of the race both candidates were minimizing any policy disagreements. They differed mostly in style, with Moser running as a revolutionary outsider and Fletcher as a pragmatic insider, and in the kind of voters they believe a Democrat will need to beat Culberson in the fall. Fletcher has focussed on converting “crossover” voters. Moser has made a case for activating Democratic voters who may have sat out, or been ignored, during previous elections. Tolentino argued that this debate obscured the fact that it’s not an either/or question: come November, the Democratic nominee will need all the votes she can get. “It’s absolutely correct that this is a Republican district, that the country-club moderates will be essential in terms of fund-raising and establishment support. But Moser’s strategy of courting voters who typically aren’t prioritized in Houston is essential, too—Fletcher is absolutely going to have to do both,” she said. The question of electability is unlikely to go away, even though the D.C.C.C. got the result it wanted. Tolentino pointed out that, within hours of Tuesday’s race being called, the local Republican Party in Harris County had put out a press release calling Fletcher “far left.”

The other suggestion to be drawn from Fletcher’s win is that, despite the energy and attention being paid to the potential for a national wave of Democratic victories in the fall, the race in the Texas Seventh is likely to play out as a self-contained affair. “It can take three hours to drive across Houston,” Tolentino said. “It’s a state within itself. A significant portion of the Houston Democratic base has been emboldened by what’s going on nationally. But this seems like it it is going to be a local race. It’s going to be about Houston at least as much as it is about Trump.”